Brave is anyone that wears the same thing as Johannes.

This recap is wearing a pumpkin costume.

It’s the Strictly Halloween Spooktacular filled with all of our favourite Halloween monsters like creepy dolls, zombies, a slightly nondescript witch and the mortifying ordeal of your mum sticking up to your high school bully for you

I don’t quite know why Josh was the only person who hadn’t engaged with the Halloween themery at all because Johannes was dressed as The Goat from The VVitch

and Emma was clearly Craig’s Jazzy Devil after being on estrogen for 18 months

Anton is Blair St Clair as Ellen DeGeneres

but all of them rather pale in comparison to Faewild Motsi who quite honestly looked the most beautiful Motsi has ever looked and she should seriously consider just dressing like this all the time

and while she looked like the Goddess of Spring, beside her was The Ice King from Adventure Time

or, to give her character their proper title The Anti-Shirley

I do not have the time to fully go into how bad the subtitles of the BBC’s live broadcasting has become over the last year but as someone who uses them a lot, I am having to edit images for the blog to correct them more than ever before. It’s just an inconvenience to me, but for anyone that uses them out of necessity it’s just kind of shitty.

The true evil that loomed over Strictly like Strahd von Zarovich was the fact three couples would be in the Dance Off with the judges instead voting for which couple to bury in an almost humiliatingly shallow grave and you’ll be shocked to learn that two of these three couples were Nancy and Bethany jiving like Worker and Parasite

and the Ghostbusters Tango that nobody could bring themselves to care about, least of all the Makeup Department who deserve some sort of capital punishment for what they did to Jowita because you see her looking like someone carved a turnip during a nuclear fallout and that ham-fisted splatter on Lawrence’s forehead

and then see the likes of Dani Dyer in full cracked porcelain doll glam

and you have to think “Maybe let’s make it a little less obvious as to who the favourites might be?” But also, I can’t blame the show for a lack of investment in Lawrence because he came in on Week One doing some very ~sexy~ floorwork

and seemed to decide he would never attempt to do anything interesting ever again. And he wasn’t about to start with Ghostbusting Slimer’s non-union cousin who goes to a different school

he was interviewed on It Takes Two over the week and talking about how much the augmented reality ghost was really testing his acting abilities and then it gets to the night and literally all he has to do is look to his left and up a bit < 3

I know he spends most of his screentime tied to a chair in someone’s shed but sir, this is hardly Hamlet at The Globe

but maybe he just doesn’t have that A* in GCSE drama

I also feel a little bit bad for Lawrence because he was unfortunately in direct competition with Katya going balls to the wall kink in a Dracula’s Dark Room themed Tango

they did tell us last week that John was going to be wearing a latex suit and in my head I had kind of rationalised it as probably being one of those rubber muscle suits that drag kings sometimes wear and Dan Walker turned down

NOPE. It’s a full office-appropriate gimp suit

AND IT’S NOT EVEN ZOOM CALL RULES

I’m obsessed with the fact that while everyone else’s VTs are about setting the Halloween mood with undead chaperones in the background,

trying to find the most sincere pumpkin patch for the imminent arrival of the Great Pumpkin

or just sitting next to a gourd of your choice

John’s is just an entire minute of him being fitted for his specialist interest button-down

they have to know how insane this is, right? Katya didn’t need a fitting, you cannot convince me that that dommy mommy ass buckled and belted corsetry didn’t come right out of her own wardrobe! And in true Katya -style the routine is maybe 60% what they’re meant to be doing and 40% throwing slutty showdance spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks

give or take a couple of percentage points here and there for the breaks from what had to be the squeakiest tango ever performed to engage in erotic vampirism because it was Halloween Week and not Swingers Night at The Red Dragon

meanwhile, the Ghostbusters’ equivalent of the 20 Seconds of That’s Not A Tango, Babe™ is them doing a bit of nogueing that looks like it came straight out of a losing girl group performance on Drag Race

and yes, Katya flip flopping all over the place like a trout that’s a little too into the flyfishing itself is an impressive piece of… athleticism? Gymnastics? Mission Impossible: The Musical choreography? But it’s also kind of a mess girl – I don’t think a tango needs tummy time

and I do appreciate that Shirley complimented the bits of actual tango John did and gave the subtlest of hints that she would like Katya to choreograph just one (1) normal straightforward routine that doesn’t devolve into navigating one of the laser corridors in a Resident Evil game

but also next week they have a Salsa so I guess that bit of advice is going straight out of the window, along with Katya if she gets her way with the lifts. And she’s going to need to go all out after Cach whipped Maddie around like James Blunt’s stick of butter this week

I cannot get over how smooth that was! And I promise I’m talking abut Cach, who had the obligatory Spooky Argentine Tango which was to Pas de Deux, credited to the movie Us, also known as Lupita N’yongo 2: Here We Go Again

and it works GREAT for an Argentine Tango – it’s certainly at least easier to Tango to than ol’ Tommy Blaize bellowing “BUSTIN’ MAKES ME FEEL GOOD!” at the top his lungs

I don’t think *anything* is making Lawrence feel good, babes

but I am curious to know if the routine was ever meant to be fully Us themed with Cach and Maddie dressed in the red jumpsuits until the show realised that the whole point of the song and film is that you’re dancing with your doppleganger, thus meaning you either White Chicks Cach

or commit a hate crime

and without the mirror image of it all, having two people in red jumpsuits is kind of just reading a little Prisoner so someone had to run out and buy the most vaguely gothic piece of neckwear they could find so that Cach could instead be AJ Pritchard dancing with the ghost of Rachel Reeves

other than the fact he spent so long failing to get on Dancing With Stars that he hasn’t realised Reeves hasn’t been Chancellor for 3 months now, my favourite part is the fact he only has nails on one hand because he had nobody to help him with his nondominant one <3 Also, imagine running a news channel and your financial correspondent is AJ Pritchard? I feel like someone is describing a dream to me. ANYWAY, that’s quite enough about that.

The Argentine Tango is always going to be a crowd pleaser on Halloween Week, it lends itself very well to the spooky mood and makes for a nice sophisticated break between Nancy and Bethany’s unintelligible softplay area Jive

and Jamie Winston scrolling Legally Distinct Undead Tinder

whomst amongst us could’ve possibly seen those themes being unpopular? Although with it being a Bottom Three this week, I don’t think Jamie and Bethany ever really stood a chance given that the best they were probably hoping for in previous weeks was scraping through as third last. And my God were the judges *trying* to create a little bit of suspense with how this week might turn out by being bizarrely harsh on Tabby’s Quickstep

and then deciding that of all the routines that should release Bethany from 27 Jail, it’s the cast members of CATS (2019) who could never get work again visiting Hotel Transylvania

apologies, this is the BBC, I will fix that quickly

#ProtectTheMotels

As much as I want to say overmarking is OK when it’s Bethany, actually!

I can only be so biased because the last 20 seconds of this routine are honestly dire. The forward roll that gave me war flashbacks to the Year 8 gymnastics exam where I did a teddy bear roll with all the grace and poise of someone in the dying throes of leprosy was bad enough but somehow the most inexcusable part for me is THE CHEST BUMP??

it’s the sort of thing I might expect from Dianne, who was unfortunately in a Couple’s Choice time-out so I guess someone had to get the Terrible Mid-point Choreographic Breakdown Disease. Lauren should also probably get tested because she didn’t just have Graeme jiggle around like a mime trying to tell you that the McDonald’s McFlurry Machine is broken once, he did it three times as though it was the only piece of vaguely samba choreography he could pick up all week

it doesn’t even look good when Lauren is doing it! The song and theme also weren’t helping – I don’t think Coconut by Harry Nilsson offers much in the way of choreographic inspiration and I think being a Zombie bartender and the shambling corpse of when Katy Perry’s music fun lock you in a little in terms of characterisation no matter how much you try to drink the pain away

and while I think Graeme barely learned how to samba, we did at least learn that Graeme clearly has an activated fanbase. It’s not often that you can survive being both last place and having the identity obscuring face paint and yet they kick off the Monkseal Safety Sex Face and Whatever Lawrence Is Feeling Gallery

and that’s another reason the the Bottom Three was bad – it severely cuts down the amount of Safety Sex Faces because there’s no such thing as a Polite Thank You Sex Face!

and I can only imagine with the result being so predictable, the judges voting unanimously to bust Lawrence’s ghost and the mostly negative reaction to it from the public that we shall NEVER be doing it ever again

the animated rainbow skull PNGs were just a diabolical cherry on top of this humiliation ritual of a cake. I did think they might get rid of Jaime at this point just because her Dance Off version of the Salsa was ROUGH and it’s her third time in that position meaning they might just want to put her out of her misery after she danced it like she was trying to curb stomp the very concept of a salsa

my personal favourite part of is when she has to do a sexy crawl and they did not make the prop nearly long enough so she kind of just looks like a cat heaving

me too, Carlos

but for the most part I do think this was quite a fun Salsa – or at least decently dynamic, it’s always fun when the pot stirrer comes out

if no other reason than that I get to post the Brendan and Charlotte Hawkins attempt that looks like he tried to do it with a wheelie bag

and the arrangement of Filthy/Gorgeous was REALLY good. As was the Traitors-ified version of My Favourite Things they used for Dani that slapped more than it had any right to

I adored this routine – Spooky Viennese Waltzes are my personal kryptonite and of the two that were done this episode I did prefer this one over Delta and Kai doing Delta and Kai things

although I do have an issue with Nikita’s choreography and it’s this great big honking illegal lift that NOBODY mentioned

or at least nobody except Louis Smith who joined in yelling at the clouds with me while he was on It Takes Two

and everyone just brushed it off was “Rules shmules, you’re such a stickler!” THEN WHAT’S THE POINT? You literally introduced the American Smooth for the sole reason of giving Brendan Cole an environmental enrichment toy to stop him from hoisting his partners mid-foxtrot! For a show that wanted to create drama by kicking the sack of puppies we call Lawrence Robb out in a vote-to-eliminate, you could very easily have just done it fairly organically by being a bit pissy about Nikita belting it across the floor carrying a woman

I want to feel like Craig wants to banish Nikita to the shadow realm himself!

I just think it’s a bit sad that we’ve lost that real competitive ballroom part of the show as we hurtle ever forward to the Every Dance Is A Showdance Event Horizon that the degenred free for all we call Couple’s Choice is most certainly not helping. SPEAKING OF WHICH

There are a lot of ways that this puppet routine could be really cool, I’m just not sure Will Best and Dianne Buswell doing it to *NU FLOW* of all the songs in the world was quite the right direction??? I think if it had leaned a little more Cabaret and Fosse it would’ve actually come across a lot cooler? But also, much like Lauren and Graeme being trapped in the zombie pigeonhole, puppets is maybe even more limiting and kind of runs its entire course in like 20 seconds before they have to do the sort of thing that only passes for choreography in a Couple’s Choice that I think only Strictly would describe as “hip-hop”

it’s also one of those routines that’s completely incongruous to the VT that comes before it which is Will talking about how much his family members like Lindy, Jessica, Lucy Best (She/Her) and Richard’s New Ipad have helped him

close enough, welcome back Handforth Parish Council.

It’ll be interesting to see how Dianne and Will fair next week because they’re kind of in the exact same situation as Tabby was the week in going from their highest scoring routine in a Couple’s Choice into a Quickstep

inside you are two evil puppets

although I think there’s at least slightly less of a chance of Dianne being dressed up as a witch suffering from cunty jaundice and Will the YouTuber that runs a prank channel that’s really just a well documented history of crimes and human rights violations

it is truly baffling that the show that is literal to the point that Will Best is dancing to Nu Flow because it is by the band Big Brovas and he hosts Big Brother could not manage to put Tabby Stoecker, gold medalling SKELETON racer, in a skeleton costume. Instead she is a Pat McGrath eyeshadow palette attending a Non-affiliated University for Witchcraft and Wizardry

don’t worry, it’s less hard to parse than Lacey and Vito who are dressed as Whatever’s Left In The Box of Halloween Decorations

I would like to see Lacey get to the final now even if it’s just to see this Charleston again without her being dressed up like the cover of Tyra Banks’s Modelland to celebrate the first time she felt true joy on this show

it was just nice to see Lacey finally smile and look like she was enjoying a routine rather than the looks of tormented fear and angst

Lawrence never quite got that far

I think the only time he ever smiled on this show was when he was granted the sweet release of a saturday morning lie in

his exit interview on It Takes Two is one of the more comfortable – there’s a long rambling anecdote about the goodbye group hug that feels like it’s a roll of the dice as to whether it ends being a suicide manifesto or a canonisation of the Strictly Come Dancing Polycule. God bless him, what a way to end Halloween.

And with that, I shall see you for Week 7 as we begin the Unthemed Stretch to Blackpool!